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Saturday, 28 April 2012

Looking for a vintage wargame/Dragonmeet 1979

I received the following e-mail from Karl. Can anyone help him with identifying this game?

Hello. I decided to email you instead of replying to a post on "Vintage Wargaming" because my question is not directly related to any particular post.

Can you or your readers help me?

I am looking for a game I played at a very early Dragonmeet. I am pretty sure I played this at the first Dragonmeet, in 1978, but there is a chance that I am misremembering and this happened at the 1979 Dragonmeet. In those days, Dragonmeet was held at the Chelsea Town Hall.

The game I played was a minis game. The genre was fantasy, with a medieval/barbarian flavor. The gamemaster had set up a wargames table with a village that had interesting things around it. Each player had their own party of adventurers. The GM had pregenerated these parties, and there seems to have been some idea of game balance in the parties, thus my party consisted of a "light cavalryman", a "heavy infantryman" and an "assassin". I remember another player just had one member of his party, a "superhero". But this was unusual, most folks had three or four party members. The idea was that various treasures were hidden around the village, and so the parties were in competition with each other to find the treasures. We would move our minis around the table, and we would find clues or have combat encounters and so on. I think that none of us actually managed to find ANY of the treasures, but it was a lot of fun. And it pretty much made me a gamer for life.

Does anyone have any information about this game, or any idea what system it would have been? It was too early for Warhammer or Cry Havoc (which someone else suggested). Each piece had its own movement rate, which you measured with a ruler. Combat and other things was determined with dice rolls, the only dice used were d6 (if I remember right).

I can remember a few more things about the specific scenario I played, if that would help anyone.

3 comments:

Hmm, sounds like it might have been Chainmmail? Heavy Foot & Light Horse are unit types, and Superhero was the name for a high-powered fighter. Maybe with some D&D mixed in? (Chainmail was the original combat system for D&D).

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